Letters to the Editor
ELYDOG
Published Letters: 497 Editor's Choice: 43
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The Spiritual Elite
[Read the article: You are the river: An interview with Ken Wilber]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The pro-Wilber posters here hint at something that has always stuck me about people who thump the tub for mysticism. We have a post here that says, 'you are either 'on or off' the bus.' Now this was obviously stolen from Ken Kesey. Ken was a writer on acid. Kesey's bus held a limited number of people. Just like the Jehovah's Witnesses or the Peoples Temple, or the Christian fundamentalists who are going to be Raptured.
We have another poster, just a little below this one, that commends Mr. Wilber with the 'erudite' obscure word play of a lunatic passing codewords through the Confessional transom. I.E., you and I mere mortals won't be able to get on either of these 'buses' because we don't know WTF they are talking about.("WTF" is code too!) And that is the essence of this, or the Scientology folks, or even the Mormons. Join the cult, get on the bus, drink the cool-aid, leave the rational world behind -and joint the spiritual 'elite' which 'knows' so much more than you crude, ignorant, reality-based fools. And, of course, there are only room for some ...
Are we that desparate to be part of a group? And maybe, yes, a 'leader' of one of these groups?
Reason and science are one of the only thing that all humans have in common, and what we share, and how we are able to bind ourselves as a world community in the modern period. Mysticism actually divides humans, as there are as many mysticisms as there are countries, or people.
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Strip Mine
[Read the article: The education of an oil reporter]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]You can stip-mine the West, North Dakota and north of Edmonton, and even Venezuela, or drill miles down off Brazil in the ocean, and it still will not bring the price down, as it is expensive to do this. Not to mention devastating to land, animal and water use.
Peak oil is already here, according to Richard Heinberg's "The Party's Over." And part of the theory of peak oil is that the 'easy' stuff is gotten. So the back half of the bell curve is not the same as the front half. It is not like draining a glass with a straw, and when you get to 'half' you are at 'peak.' It is more like digging a hole, and the first 6 feet are soft dirt, and the last 6 feet are rock. Literally.
Almost every major oil field in the world is past peak except a few. The Saudi's et al. lie about what is under their sand, as their 'reserves' haven't gone down in years. They will not allow independent observers to look at the figures.
Most of the people yelling about the high price of gas do not understand what is going on ... yet. But they will, and when that happens, look out.
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Underlying
[Read the article: The education of an oil reporter]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Oil prices on a day or month to month basis are not determined directly by peak oil. Speculation, falling dollar, threats to the oil supply system, usage, all play a role. As well as the search for super-profits by the oil companies.
Peak oil is just the underlying tendency, like global climate change is underlying the day to day, month to month, even year to year weather.
They both share a similarity, in that this planet is not an unlimited or controllable resource.
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Either Or
[Read the article: The education of an oil reporter]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Conservatives have to dismiss peak oil. In order to do so, they have to insist that it doesn't play a role in price - ever - because other factors are at play. The 'either/or' mentality. Kind of like setting parameters so you can 'win' your argument, when the parameters are incorrect.
Or like claiming manic-depression doesn't affect mood because they saw that person happy today, and therefore they don't have manic-depression. Or the conservatives in Minnesota who said, well, we had a very cold winter and spring, so global climate change must be incorrect.
We are not talking about today's price alone, of course. We are looking down the road, and predicting the future course of oil. But less supply due to peaking oil/more difficult oil extraction, making stagnant or less capacity, is playing even now a subtle role in slowly raising the price. Saudi, Russia, Nigeria actually cannot keep up with demand right now, which is also rising. The Saudi's are pumping vast amounts of water into the oil fields to pump out oil, which shows the pressure has dropped.
The perfect scissors, in essence.